


River of No Return

by DesaChaseJackson



Series: The Twenty-Sided Sorceress [9]
Category: Magic - Fandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:00:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28228800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesaChaseJackson/pseuds/DesaChaseJackson
Summary: Supposedly, nature abhors a vacuum. I'm finding this is true in the worst way...Defeating her evil ex-boyfriend hasn't exactly been the reprieve from trouble that Jade hoped for. When Alek's mentor shows up with an injured Justice and government agents start asking questions she doesn't want to answer, Jade's problems are just beginning. Enemies new and old make their moves as a war looms on the horizon.River of No Return is the ninth book in The Twenty-Sided Sorceress series.
Relationships: Jade Crow /Aleksei Kirov
Series: The Twenty-Sided Sorceress [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1800691





	River of No Return

Softpaw raised his head to better catch the scents in the wind rolling down the valley. It was late evening and Halfheart hadn’t returned to the pack. They’d had a successful hunt the day before and the pack was lazing around at the edge of the pines along the valley’s base. The spring had been hotter and drier than usual and the stream here was little more than a trickle through the grey and brown rocks. 

It wasn’t unusual for Halfheart to wander off, especially after a hunt. Especially, Softpaw thought, since the pack had come back close to Wylde. The grey wolf had been with Softpaw’s pack since the previous autumn and was still getting used to life here in the wilderness, living in the open, away from humans. Softpaw pushed away his worries with a snort and turned to look over his pack. He had a dozen wolves with him at the moment. Some, like Snowdrop and Bird, had been with him for many years, others were newer, though Halfheart was the newest at the moment. 

They came to him through referrals, or sometimes just straggling into the vast wilds that made up the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. All of them weary of the human world, all of them broken in some way. Softpaw looked to Bird, the big red wolf resting his head on a tree root. Some, he thought, were very broken. Bird would likely never take human form again. His physical wounds had healed a century before but the mental and emotional scars remained. 

The verdict was still out on Halfheart. He’d lost his mate to a horrific car accident and spiraled into an angry depression. Freyda, the Alpha of Alphas and Halfheart’s pack leader, had sent him to Softpaw, worried that the wolf would lash out at humans, worried that the Council and its Justices would then come destroy him. Halfheart had picked his pack name, something that Softpaw, who was known to the human world as Aurelio, did not require, but they all did it. The name change seemed to provide separation from the pain of who they had been, of whatever had driven these wolf-shifters to the wilds and into his pack. 

Softpaw worried that he had brought the pack too close to Halfheart’s home town. But the Bitterroot pack always came closer to Wylde in the summer and fall. Between the presence of the druid in this part of the Frank, and the local shifters keeping bans on hunting wolves and other predators written into the law around these parts, it was safer for the pack as a whole. But perhaps not for Halfheart’s broken heart. 

He was dragged from his dark thoughts by Snowdrop. The white wolf emerged from the shadows of the pines and approached him with a wag of her tail. They touched noses and then she playfully bumped his shoulder with her head as she sat beside him. Softpaw reached out to her mind with his own and felt the easy connection. Snowdrop stayed with him because she loved him almost as much as she loved the wilderness. She had long ago accepted they would never be mates, for though Softpaw cared deeply for her, and though she’d been his second for over a century, and his rock through the pain of losing his daughter, there was no fire in him for her. 

An impression of a grey and brown wolf ran from her mind to his with the feel of a question. Snowdrop was worried about Halfheart as well. The telepathy Softpaw was capable of wasn’t strong in reverse. He could put words into the minds of his wolves, provided they let him in, but what he got back from them were more feelings, images, impressions, than true communication. Still, it was enough that shifting for human speech was unnecessary. With the longer-term members of his pack, they could get by on wolf vocalizations and body language alone much of the time. 

For while his pack looked like wolves, if twice to three times the size of real wolves, they were shifters in the end and they had human impulses, instincts, and needs buried under their thick fur. Human minds that Softpaw could touch with his own. 

He hadn’t touched Halfheart’s mind yet. Softpaw usually waited at least a couple years or until the new pack member seemed settled before doing so. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever met another shifter with telepathy and his gift was not something he shared with too many. Some of the broken ones who came to his pack never learned of it. He used his instincts on whom to trust. 

Snowdrop bumped his shoulder again, less gently. Softpaw growled at her but without any teeth in it and turned his head so his nose caught the scent of the wind again. There, the smell so faint he thought he’d imagined it the first time around. Wood fire with a hint of chemical to it. Not a wildfire, for there would have been more sign in the birds and insects. Which meant humans. Not far. It was time to move the pack. 

“Too long,” he said into Snowdrop’s mind. “He’s usually back before dark.” The sun was a red-orange disk on the horizon, staining the grey peaks in the distance the color of raw meat. 

Snowdrop lifted her head and scented the smoke, her mind feeding him worry and danger in the shape of shadowy men. 

“Rouse the pack,” Softpaw mind-spoke to her. “We will track our own.” 

Halfheart would likely have left little trail, but it didn’t matter. With a heaviness settling in beside the feeling of dread in his belly, Softpaw turned his nose to the smoky wind again. His instincts were almost never wrong. 

He would find his wolf in the direction of the humans. He just hoped that he wouldn’t find tragedy there as well.


End file.
